Boats often provide removable stairs to ease boarding. The stairs are designed to be removed when the boat leaves dock and is underway. Many boarding stairs are mounted to the boat by a bracket. These brackets stick out from the boat and it is desirable to remove the protruding bracket to avoid damaging the bracket and the area of the boat where the bracket is mounted during docking or when coming alongside another boat.
Existing boarding stairs brackets do not provide an easy means to release the stairs. Most conventional boarding stairs have a half-inch steel bar horizontally across the top of the stairs. The bar must be inserted through the stairs and through holes in the mounting bracket, then secured with cotter pins or nuts to keep the bar from sliding out. However, aligning the bar with the holes in the stairs and the bracket, while a boat is rocking in the water by a dock, is a difficult and frustrating endeavor. Moreover, the cotter pins or nuts that secure the bar can be very easily dropped and lost in the harbor water. In addition, many brackets are held to the boat by a mounting plate, allowing removal of the bracket. When the bracket is removed, the mounting plate does not protrude substantially from the boat, thereby avoiding potential damage to the boat when it comes along side a dock or another boat. The mounting plate screws to the side of the boat and is substantially flush. A vertical slot in the mounting plate accepts the bracket and a pin is inserted through a slot in the mounting plate and a hole in the bracket to hold the bracket in place. As with the boarding stairs mounting bar, the pins securing the bracket to the mounting plate are very easily dropped and lost during the removal process. Additionally, the mounting plate's vertical slot for the bracket requires several inches of free space above the mounting plate so the bracket can be dropped in. The bracket must be mounted high on the side of the boat, close to the level of the deck, so that the top stair will not require too great a last step for boarding. However, many boats have lips, rub rails, and other features that extend beyond the side of the boat, making it difficult to locate the mounting plate close to the level of the deck but also provide enough free space above the mounting plate for the bracket to be dropped in. For this reason, boats with such features cannot use releaseable boarding stairs brackets, but must rely on permanently fixed brackets. As noted above, this is undersirable, because the bracket protrudes beyond the side of the boat; the protruding bracket can be torn away during docking or coming alongside another boat, thereby damaging the hull, or it can damage other boats.